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New submitter kallisti5 writes "The Haiku project released their 4th alpha release today. A year and four months have passed since the 3rd alpha release. Haiku R1A4 includes several enhancements such as a large number of bug fixes, early IPv6 support, better drivers, improved file system support, better localization, and a wide variety of new features and applications."
Multimedia enhancements include support for modern Intel and Radeon HD cards.

I use PS1 similar to how The Great War later became known as World War I, one of those after the fact things.

And thanks for explaining where the term PSX came from. I'm still tempted now to feign surprise at how we missed out on the Playstation 4 through 9 though whenever people continue to refer to the original Playstation as the PSX. Muahahahaha.

Personally, I loved BeOS, but for various reasons ended up as something of a dead end. Everything else has moved on. There are still a few nice idea in the OS but I'd far prefer to see them incorporated into something new.

Haiku has been making excellent progress over the last couple of years compared to another clone, ReactOS. Haiku is actually quite usable as it is and pretty stable. In fact, I'd say its stability gives Win9x and even most Windows XP installations I've seen a run for their money. I don't mess with Windows any more since XP, but I do know at least one person who kept getting program crashed and BSODs in Vista and he still gets them occasionally in 7. ReactOS, by comparison, feels like a pre-alpha at best

I've used Windows 2, then 3, then 3.1 then 95, then 98, then ME. They are such monumental piece of crap that they - IMO - do not deserve the title of OS. They were a poorly written graphical layer on top of DOS, which was just a "Disk Operating System". It managed disks and barely anything else.

Granted, over the years, they added several things, such as printer drivers support, graphics drivers support etc and it made it look more and more like a full fledged operating system. However, trying to run a few t

They were a poorly written graphical layer on top of DOS, which was just a "Disk Operating System".

This is popular revisionism. Starting with Windows 3.1 it was no longer a DOS program as it used its own drivers and did its own memory management.

In fact, starting at Windows 95, things get a little muddy, I agree. But there is still MS-DOS behind the scene as all old programs need it. So apps are given way too many privileges. And the scheduler is based on interruptions which can be meddled with from any MS-DOS app.

You see, the problem was that all apps had the full control over the entire machine, by design, since it was the way things were back in old DOS mode and backward compatibility was "paramount".

Well, technically true. But given the fact that accessing a floppy disk drive halts the entire system, I'll say they missed the target by a wide margin. In fact, any interrupt call can freeze the OS to death. So my point stands: apps were

BeOS was a good looking interface - for its time. Now it (and by extension Haiku) looks rather dated by comparison with modern GUIs (especially when you look at the lovely looking things that Apple, or google with its Android project buttery loveliness create.

Actually, I'm relatively sure that in practice that's precisely what it is.
Although more familiarity with similar systems/interfaces (in the real world too) than with the actual OS/program in question.

No, familiarity means prior knowledge or understanding. Intuitive means your instincts (intuition) are usually right. For example, back in the day (10 years ago), I would regularly recommend people try out non-Nokia cellphones. The usual response was "the menus are unintuitive". What they meant was, they had invested so much time in learning to use their Nokia that they couldn't cope with trying anything else. It used to be said often that putting "shut down" on the "start" menu in Windows is ridiculou

You naysayers can feel free to call me crazy, but Haiku has a better chance at winning the desktop than Linux ever did. It is exactly the kind of coherent and elegantly designed platform that is as attractive to users as it is to developers. Haiku has been a slow starter, so it may take a while to happen unless more devs start to look at the prospect of seriously contributing to it. But the truth is, quality takes time. The Linux approach of "code first, ask questions later" does get things done faster. The desktop is just one of those cases where better will always beat faster in the long run.

Shenanigans. I tested it a couple of years ago and was definitely unimpressed. It's not godawful ugly, but it's not that pretty either. It is in fact clearly outdated, old-fashioned, obsolete. It is clearly based on Windows 95, only worse. Add little choice in applications and obviously poor hardware support, and this will never be anything more than a hobby for lonely nerds with nothing to do on a Saturday night.

The reason for the outdated interface is that Haiku R1 is going to be strictly an attempt to clone BeOS. That was always the stated goal of the project. R2 on the other hand, will be the version where the Haiku team really focuses on building upon what they have to create something better. That being said, the internals of Haiku are already fairly robust and capable, and have advanced well beyond the capabilities of BeOS. I think that once R1 is complete and the internals are solid and stable, the road to 2

Look, people need some kind of incentive to use anything, and first impressions are critical. When people see an OS that looks like it's 18 years old, they will not like it, they will most certainly not find any reason to use it.

Even if they do, what about hardware and drivers? Linux fights an uphill battle to support as much hardware diversity as possible, and pretty much succeeds because there is a lot of people working on it. Haiku has a very small community, badly und

If you're trying to develop a commercial product, best make sure it has no GPL code in it.

I think you mean: If you're trying to develop a commercial product by stealing others' code and claiming it's your own, best make sure it has no GPL code in it.

GPL code has no legal problems that aren't much larger if you base your work on someone else's proprietary code. GPL merely legalizes your "stealing", but says you must then permit others to "steal" your code as well. With proprietary code, anything you do with it is illegal.

Not that this matters much to the users, who mostly don't ever write any code, much less attempt to sell it.

(There's a long tradition in technical circles of taking insults and turning them into technical jargon. And there's the old saying that copying from one person is plagiarism, but copying from many is research.;-)

Simple, because in the case of copyright infringement, no one is taking Rihanna's songs, posting them online and claiming them as their own (i.e. "look at these songs I made!").

What you are talking about, though, is neither copyright infringement nor stealing: it's plagiarizing. As in the simple pre-GPL world, the rules are simple: want to build derivative works off of mine and sell them for profit? You can do that, you just need a specific license from me to do that (as happens with any other non-free soft

So do you think that if a company decided to release a slightly modified GPL application without the source, and they were open about it being a slightly modified GPL application, people would be as forgiving as they are with file sharers?

You have just made up a totally arbitrary distinction between copyright infringement on works you don't care about (copying Rihanna's songs) and copyright infringement on works you do care about (GPL software).

In both cases, the worse offence of making money off the copyright infringement still only arises because you have infringed on copyright. Plagiarism is nothing to do with it.

Using a piece of GPL code in a proprietary software is not necessarily plagiarism. You may publicly announce the code is in there. It's still copyright ingringement in that it doesn't respect the terms and conditions set by the original author.

It's also worth noting that the GPL actually encourages plagiarism in some cases. Consider someone wanting to use freely available code as the basis for a closed source offering (or maybe even open source, but doesn't want to deal with the hassle of the GPL's draconian source archive management requirements). If the code the person finds that best suits his or her needs is distributed under the MIT/X11 License (for instance), that person might proudly refer to the open source roots of the software. If it

When your license imposes the overhead costs of a bunch of source archive management, bookkeeping, and so on, it creates incentives to plagiarize for people working on projects that do not turn a profit or for startups.

Once again, we might note that this isn't a property of the GPL; it's just as true for proprietary code. The only real difference is that GPL'd code is usually published openly and comes with a license that lets anyone use the code for free, while you typically have to pay for a license to use proprietary code -- if you can even get a license to use the code.

There is no difference in the legally required accountability when you use someone else's code. If you do this at all, you need to keep good recor

When your license imposes the overhead costs of a bunch of source archive management, bookkeeping, and so on, it creates incentives to plagiarize for people working on projects that do not turn a profit or for startups.

Once again, we might note that this isn't a property of the GPL; it's just as true for proprietary code. The only real difference is that GPL'd code is usually published openly and comes with a license that lets anyone use the code for free, while you typically have to pay for a license to use proprietary code -- if you can even get a license to use the code.

It is a property of copyright restrictions in general, yes. This is, in fact, sorta my point. The GPL does not provide nearly the level of greater ease of code reuse that many people seem to think.

. . . and you completely bypassed my point, which was the fact that plagiarism is incentivized for GPLed (and, yes, proprietary) code in ways that do not apply to copyfree and public domain code. In short, any copyright restrictions that impose any overhead on the reuser of your code serves as a trade-off betwe

ITYM: the GPL is considered pretty evil by incompetent lawyers. It's good that way. If your lawyer has an irrational fear of the GPL, the fire the lawyer since it's clear you've wound up with a duff one.

If you're trying to develop a commercial product, best make sure it has no GPL code in it.

Like RHEL, IBM, Android, Linksys, and frankly, thousands of others. That's an excellent model to follow.

Oh you said avoid GPL. Right.

b) some people hate Richard Stallman even more than they hate Steve Ballmer.

Well, if people are going to make strange, irrational decisions based on strange, irrational assumptions about a person they've never met and who has little if anything to do with what they're using, then they get what they deserve.

Well, if people are going to make strange, irrational decisions based on strange, irrational assumptions about a person they've never met and who has little if anything to do with what they're using, then they get what they deserve.

You kind of have to admit that Stallman is doing more harm than any good every time he sticks his beard out of his hole. I mean, just look at him or listen to him -- is it any wonder then that people make irrational assumptions about him?

The key advantage to Commercial Software is you tend to know what the motives are for the software maker. To Make money.

For Open Source they have a lot of different motives.Gain Experience, Give their Ego's a boost, Trying to give back to the community, Sell additional services later...

That is the problem, I agree Making money isn't the most noble cause in the world, however if you realize that is the game they are playing you as the consumer can use it to your advantage, because you can always say No I wil